Bird Watching

South on Rte. 340, hundreds of sparrows break into cones, black and white thunder:

whooshing, flailing against the shallow river of orange light. These dark stalkers seek

and climb, roll into deep blue breezes while truck drivers hose down their wheels,

spraying salt and snow off the hard rubber. Their hearts fly backwards

towards food, wives, and shadows. This afternoon spell spins out of control

on them. Several stare from the cabs or pace the parking lot, alone. Manic, one lifts

and glides away from the swirl and vortex of those other twirling sparrows. Bumping

nervously along, he sinks and swivels across Middletown Road, into the hollow.

See the redbuds’ early pink leaves flicker like wings in the great gusts from dumptrucks:

all these little boys follow one another, trying to steer like men into Front Royal.

June, Cross Junction

Robin commutes carefully across the road, obeying laws: gravity, exertion.

Tractors sputter and throw obscene stares and short staccato bursts

of choking smoke behind them. Her red breast swells and recedes: she never stalls,

never gyrates in circles, never swoops out of control. Across the lawn,

her cheerily-cheerup is never desperate, her call never floats into a question.

My girlfriend doesn’t know lovely depressive mornings or the spinning, chaotic evening.

Reclining on the lawn, I’m laying my raked and combed head on a spinning planet,

just level with her ordered hopping, instincts, directions. Bobbing, she snaps her beak

together, scans the ground with pitiless eyes. Spurs thrust deeply into sandy loam,

she’s pulling a worm from her feet, through her heart, torqued to the back of her neck.

The head feeds her hunger, but bites off an extra section for fear she didn’t get enough.

Parade with white foamed lips, she looks like she’s swallowed a blossom.

January, Winchester

Down Cameron Street, the cracked hard glaze of ice wants to thaw. On my steps,

footsteps are frozen, toes pointed away from home. On the open windowsill,

pieces of molded bread and tomato ends lure him into the street lamp’s glow.

Trotting, side to side, he sings a song he’s never stopped learning. Fluted phrases,

whistling higher and higher: you, you, you.  Winter stops. His long grey tail feathers

bob up and down; he’s warming his behind at the crack in my window. He drags

his wings through another singing come from his white chest, spotted

and riddled with mud: me, me, me . The notes scrape the window and creep

into where I’ve been left. silence and a new round of snowing. The kettle brags and he

opens his beak when it’s blown, breaking

into: pay, pay, pay . We’re both blinking through the steam hovering over the kettle.

He leaves me, my fingers winging across a pane of glass, tracing her name in moisture.